The struggle between  reason and passion, freedom and domination and democracy and tyranny has been part of the Western world since such ideas and practices were first debated in Athens. But this conflict is not simply  a debate between opposing philosophies, but a quick look at history, has shown how how fragile are the forces of reason and democracy in face of anger, fear and tyranny. The archetypical expression of irrational tyranny was Hitler's Germany, but let's not forget Stalin's gulags, Pol Pots killing fields  or George Bush's Abu Ghraib. In our present age, the legacy of Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud have given most powerful tools to understand the fragility of democracy and the lure of authoritarianism. In the 1920s, the Frankfurt studies of authority and the family, shed light on the question asked by La Boete, why do people voluntarily submit to authority? As Eric Fromm would put it, why are people so willing to escape authority?


Prof. Alessandro Pinzani (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil)
The Need for Social Justice. What is Necessary for a Decent Life?

While the discussion on social justice is experiencing a renaissance, it seems that there is no consent on what its object should be: recognition or redistribution? Redistribution of what? Authors such as Honneth, Fraser, Rawls and Sen, just to mention a few, have given different answers to these questions. In my paper I shall make a small step backwards and try to identify those aspects of human life, in which questions of justice arise at all. In doing so, I shall recur to the concept of “needs”. Far from being an obvious candidate for a discussion on justice, the very idea of need is debatable and debated, but it can help to define roughly the elements that constitute a decent life – a concept that should always be at the center of any theory of social justice. In this sense, the paper has the character of a preliminary step towards a more complete theory of this kind.